family – Frozen Grapes Are Not Dessert

The American Road Trip, or How to Make Memories

The American road trip summer vacation. I assume other countries also road trip, but Woody Guthrie was on to something when he sang about America. From the redwood forests, to the Gulfstream waters, there is a lot to see here, and in fact we looked those lyrics up in their entirety on our recent road trip. Driving across the country fuels patriotism.

I think everyone has a road trip story. Childhood is full of road trips. We’re totally dependent at this point. The car is packed, and away we go. If we’re lucky, there are an abundance of snacks to make up for our childhood powerlessness. I have very vivid memories of driving the 9 hours to my grandparents’ house when I was young. It was a different era, so one kid was always rotating into the “way back” of the station wagon, and as such the dynamic up in the front changed a bit, keeping it fresh. I remember a lot of singing (we were that family), and a lot of stories on tape (stories I can still tell today, and that my brothers and I break out lines from like great comedy sketches), and there were those games with the little red vinyl windows where you marked if you saw a cow, a semi, a church…

As adults, we are more in charge of the destination, and thankfully there are still snacks. In college, road trips changed slightly… up to Niagara Falls (Canada side, where the drinking age was lower and we could go OUT), to the Shore, to home and to friends parents’ houses when we needed to be reminded that food didn’t always come in take-out containers or industrial-sized steel vats. As an adult, I drove to and from Colorado from the Eastern Time Zone a few times before moving here for good. My husband proved his mettle with my family while we were still dating by spontaneously driving us the 20 hours from Colorado to Ohio when our Christmas flight was canceled. Our bags were already packed, and what’s 20 hours in a 13-miles-per-gallon Dodge Ram when you’re young and in love?

Spontaneous proofs of commitment notwithstanding, there are two types of road trips. One is the meandering, hells yes, let’s stop at the 60-foot-Jolly-Green-Giant road trip, and the other is the drive-straight-through hyped up on caffeine and possibly an ice bath to the back of the neck when all else fails (this is stupid and dangerous, obviously; never get to this point). When you add children into a road trip equation, the latter option is pretty much off the table. And suddenly, it’s a childhood road trip again, but it’s no longer YOUR childhood road trip. It’s THEIRS. And because you, now the driving, snack-dispensing, responsible adult, remember your childhood road trips, you have the added weight of knowing that you really are MAKING MEMORIES. The great American road trip has begun.

At the risk of sounding old and crotchety, the road trip is totally different for kids ‘these days’ than it was in our childhood. As we packed up for our 2015 trek, we packed books, and crayons and paper and magnetic tangram puzzles, and withheld the kids’ monthly magazine subscriptions until we were on the road. It could have been 1988. But today’s children also have Chrome books and Netflix and mobile hotspots, and since my children are – they will tell you – deprived enough to not have their own cell phones, they have the second-best chorus of, “Can I play on your phone?” More than once, my husband and I said, “When we were kids….” And, much like ourselves as children, I’m sure, we were largely ignored. And yet, somewhere in western Minnesota, my youngest started counting windmills. And then there were too many windmills to count, so she started to count red barns. Road trips are like that, no matter how much technology is along. My husband and I tried to interest the girls in the license plate game, but the highways in eastern South Dakota are long and empty. While they quickly grew bored of checking the one or two cars that passed every 20 minutes, my husband and I doubled down to really invest in it (we got 42/50, including Alaska, plus 5 Canadian provinces, so we kinda rocked it, just saying).

In our non-road trip lives, we live in a suburban metropolis. Because we live next to a park and have a mountain view, I sometimes forget, until I spend some time in rural Minnesota and South Dakota, that we live in a crowded people soup. It’s not an exaggeration to say that we rarely have to go more than 5 minutes to accomplish our daily lives. Sometimes for soccer games it stretches to 15 minutes, but we grumble about that. By deciding to drive 1700 miles in less than a week, we were definitely making a gamble. I should note that I have two very different children. One is, as a friend said in reminding me to be a road trip palm tree (not an oak), energy incarnate. The other is an introspective, contemplative child who processes much more internally, and who, luckily enough, can sleep almost any time she is in a car.

Do you know where Rapid City is located in South Dakota? I’m going to be honest. I did not. I never gave it any thought, even when my husband proposed and planned this road trip. We were in South Dakota when it occurred to me to wonder. It turns out Rapid City is in western South Dakota. Pretty far west. Pretty much across the entire state, if you’re starting from Minnesota. But it also turns out that as soon as you cross the Missouri River (about mid-South Dakota, for those geography buffs), the entire landscape changes. Instead of flat farmland, it becomes green rolling hills and buttes. It’s a change so dramatic that it focuses you on the landscape and, since there aren’t many other vehicles on the road with you, you can’t help but imagine what the change meant to wagon trains 200 years ago. You mean we just lost half our number crossing that river, and now we need enough horses or cattle to ranch? It’s no wonder the allure of gold was so strong (as opposed to today, when the allure of easy money has totally lost its luster).

About the time that the scenery got really picturesque, our oldest woke up car sick from her most recent nap, since we were somehow better about carrying Dramamine around as a cup of water on a bonfire, rather than dispensing it preventatively. Our youngest, always ready to push boundaries and fight boredom with pugnacious mischief-making, was thrilled to have a newly conscious target, and, already feeling below par, her sister wasn’t about to turn the other cheek. This was the tightrope that we spent the last five road-winding hours walking. Children know that you have no true, immediate discipline options on a road trip, in a car. Our route included multiple stops to break up the day, which meant that a 9-hour drive stretched to 15. It’s a lot of together time and, my helpful comparisons to the size and time and distance of wagon trains aside, the car grew smaller as the hours grew longer. Come ON, kids! We’re making MEMORIES here! “Can I play on your phone?” “No. Well, yes. But at least LOOK outside while I get it out.”

A funny thing happened, though. After that 15 hour drive, our bar reset. How far is it? About 30 minutes. No comment. How far is it? Two hours. Shrug. We spent a lot of time in the car and for the majority of it, we were – I think – making memories. When we drove through Custer State Park and got caught in a traffic jam of buffalo, the girls were exhilarated, joyous in their wonder at these giants in our midst. “It was only 2 hours,” they pleaded, “Can we do it again?”

By the drive home, maybe we’d found our groove, or maybe we were all just tired and mellow. The 6-hour-drive took about 12, including an hour-and-a-half tour of the Wind Cave, a sizable stop at a wild mustang sanctuary, lunch and dinner. Our youngest created an entire world with the stuffed horse she’d gotten at the sanctuary and named Isabella; our oldest mostly napped, that enviable talent. As we pulled into our driveway, unbending our stiff legs and backs, thrilled to be home, but glad to have left, the youngest of us summed it up perfectly: “Good job, family!”

Fathers and Daughters

Being a father is a somewhat thankless job. As a daughter and a mother, I appreciate fathers only more as I grow older, as I realize not only the incredible and positive impact that my own father had on me, but as I watch my husband navigate his role as well.

We spend less on Father’s Day than on Mother’s Day. And a quick scroll through social media gives a complex picture of the holiday. There are touching photos of tiny daughters dancing on their father’s shoes, and heart-felt quotes and photos of much older daughters, brides now, dancing in their father’s arms. But there are also a lot more jokes than you see with mother’s day. A lot more cards with fathers sitting in arm chairs in front of the television, or nods to the notion that fathers are a loving and open wallet. And there’s a lot more anger. Anger from children and from mothers about fathers who didn’t make the jump to being “dad.”

Parenthood in general has become much more of a balancing act between home and career. Compared to even 50 years ago, more mothers are working outside the home, whether as corporate lawyers or as fulltime facilitators of their own and their children’s activities and pursuits, and more fathers are working within it, as fulltime or equal partners in the three C’s of parenthood: cleaning, carpooling and caretaking. I think that’s proof of evolution. We’re less defined by our gender than we are by our interests. Popular culture, however, has yet to catch up. We’re still more likely to see a well-intentioned but bumbling father on primetime tv than we are an inept mother. Father’s Day itself wasn’t made official until 1972, while Mother’s Day has been on the books since 1914. Fatherhood is a somewhat thankless job.

Single parents are the greatest superheroes there are in my book. I look at everything that has to be done, day in and day out, and the thought of tackling it alone is sobering and terrifying. And so many parents do it every day, and do an amazing job. I am, however, infinitely grateful to have had my father dance with me on his shoes when I was his tiny daughter. I’m grateful that later, he ran beside me as I learned to ride a bike, and then sat beside me, at times terrified I’m sure, as I learned to drive a car. He taught me how to love music as a visceral element of the soul, the fine art of dry wit, and the importance of getting on with it, whatever it might be at the time, without complaint, to get the job done, because hard work is part of life and is better embraced than bemoaned. My father unquestionably has my back. Every time. When I do good things, when I do incredibly stupid things. I know he’s not proud of every decision I’ve ever made, but that he be proud of the sum total of them is hugely important to me, because he’s a man who I will look up to forever.

Because my father is a hardworking, centered, loving man, I knew what to look for in a partner. Sure, I messed that up a few times first, but because I had my father’s example, I knew when I’d chosen poorly, and knew to keep looking. My husband doesn’t have a collection of vinyl records to share with his children, and he doesn’t sing songs at bedtime, but he’s the father to our daughters that my own childhood taught me to search for. He gets up at 5am every morning so that he can pick his children up from school, at which point he shuttles them to various dance classes and soccer practices, and helps make duct tape clothing for Girl Scouts and badgers them into cleaning and homework and general responsibility. He keeps our ship running while also giving our daughters a perspective that I just don’t have. He lets them jump from that high wall, and he assumes that they can trench a sprinkler system and that a little blood on the pavement is just a part of growing up, worth a Band-Aid, deserving of some tears, but not excessive coddling. Right now, his daughters think he can fix anything. In time they will discover that a broken toy is more easily mended than a battered heart or disappointed hopes, but because they know that their father has their backs, they’ll be okay, and will keep their standards high.

Happy Father’s Day to my dad and to my husband, two of the most loving, hard working, steadfast men I know. All my love.

Frozen Grapes Are Not Dessert

“Stop it, stop it, stop it, stop it!!”

This childhood battle cry, from in front of Disney Channel’s Jessie (or it could have been Austin & Ally) was my tipping point. It was Friday of a long week, and in the first four seconds of being home — that beautiful, wonderful, sacred place that we daydream about from our desks — my 7-year-old daughter yelled, Mommy!!!!, in that heartwarmingly excited way that children have, and then unleashed a MLB-worthy fastball pitch right into my eye. It was a 2-inch soccer-inspired foam stress ball, but it HURT! And then, despite the fact that everyone else in my family had been home all day, dishes were piled on the kitchen counter and sink. I’m not a clean-house fanatic by any means (my husband is laughing right now at even the suggestion). We have two daughters, ages 7 and 8, and three cats, and two tired parents. But somehow, for no good reason, those dirty dishes just ticked me off, and sent me into a cleaning frenzy, still in my jacket, and much to everyone’s general confusion.

“Stop it, stop it, stop it, stop it!!” ….I don’t know what sibling complaint this was about because suddenly, I was sitting in my youngest daughter’s room, in front of her not-quite-empty Easter basket, foraging for chocolate …. ooooh, and jelly beans! How has she not eaten the jelly beans when they’re the best thing…. but I digress.

I love my kids. They’re funny, dynamic, creative people. And while they still feel bathroom towel hooks are strictly ornamental, and enjoy the good secreted yogurt-container science experiment in bedroom back corners, they are amazing. I worry that I’m failing them by being so constantly tired at the end of the day, by posting adorable photos of family time, instead of being fully present in family time, by not fully savoring every last drop of wonder in these days and years that are going by so, so quickly.

I love my husband. He’s the stable pivot point of my pendulum, the foothold just when I think I’ve missed a step. And when I want to strangle him… well, clearly I’ve never actually done it. But because of a few health issues — chronic hives, chronic GI issues — I worry I’m failing him, too, day-to-day. There have been a lot of family plans postponed, plans simply unmade, better-nots and wish-I-coulds, because… what if I wake up covered in hives? Despite a wardrobe infused with linen, hives on a hot summer day are self-esteem sabotaging. What if we get to the top of that mountain, or take that back road, and I’m desperate for a bathroom? Uh huh, great view, can we get the heck out of here? As fast as possible? It’s like being a hostage to your own fears until they become self-perpetuating. Actually, it’s not like that at all. It’s exactly that.

And now I’m finally ready to change it.

And so… that brings us to this blog. Frozen grapes are not dessert. I believe that literally and passionately. Because seriously, chocolate lava cake is dessert. Hot fudge sundaes. Maybe even strawberries and (real) whipped cream. But every so often I read a celebrity interview that cites frozen grapes as a favorite dessert. Just… no. If anything, they could be a clever ice cube substitute for summer cocktails. But I’ve recently started thinking about this as a life motto. No more substitutions. As they say, anything worth doing is worth doing right. I want to make plans and climb mountains, to feel alert and healthy and present. I’m on a quest to choose the real, the worthwhile, and even if I have to temporarily give up actual dessert to do it, I’m ready, because frozen grapes are not dessert.